CARMEL, Ind. — Her summer job is to keep everyone safe at the pool. But a Carmel High School graduate is thankful her own life was saved by a fellow lifeguard.
Catherine "Cat" Baker was in the lifeguard chair, keeping watch last month when things suddenly went blurry.
"I remember stepping down from my chair, taking a couple steps and the next thing I know I'm in the ER waking up like, 'Where am I? Why does everything hurt? Why can't I move my body?'" she said.
Her mom, Jennifer Pope Baker, happened to be nearby.
"Someone said 'your daughter fell down,'" Baker said. "When I got to where she was ... she couldn't feel anybody touch her and she couldn't move any part of her body at all. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury about six years ago, and so all I could think in my mind was she's done, it's over."
But when fellow lifeguard Hayden White saw her, he immediately suspected it may be something else.
"I noticed she's having muscle cramps, hot, very pink dry skin, and then all the sudden her body goes rigid," White said.
White is a junior at Purdue University who's studying athletic training. He said he knew from what he'd learned in an "emergencies in athletics training" course that Baker was likely suffering from heat stroke.
"We practice this over and over again," said White, who knew they didn't have much time.
"Heat stroke is potentially lethal if not caught right away, so I knew we had to start cooling her down as soon as possible," he said. "We used the instant ice packs and started having them on her neck and her forehead and also in her armpits just to try and cool her down. We also used popsicles in the freezer."
Cat and her mom said it was Hayden's quick thinking that made the difference.
"One of my friends said he was an angel that day and I really believe that," Baker said.
Today, Cat Baker has made a full recovery and said, as a lifeguard, she's grateful to Hayden White for guarding her own.
"Safe to say he saved my life," Cat said.
She returned to campus at the College of Wooster in northeast Ohio over the weekend to begin her junior year. Hayden returns to Purdue’s campus a junior this week.